Team Cognition and Interaction Analysis in Organizations: Insights from Memristor Metaphor

Computer networks and information systems have long served as rich sources of analogies and metaphors in the study of human cognitive processes and collective information processing. This paper explores how these metaphors have provided valuable insights and led to the development of conceptual constructs such as TMS that extend beyond individual cognition to encompass collective intelligence in group settings. Building on this foundation, we introduce the "memristor"—a circuit element that combines memory and resistance, allowing for the creation and storage of various states, akin to mental states—as a novel metaphor to represent an interaction pattern and dimension in human collaborative thinking. The memristor, in its technical sense, involves variable and manipulable resistance, and it is metaphorically used here to characterize the productive role of resistance and dissent in collaborative thought processes. This metaphor informs the development of new interaction categories that are integrated into an expanded Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) scheme. The proposed scheme includes four additional categories for productive dissent: X1 (Accepts criticism), X2 (Self-distancing to discuss disagreement), X3 (Constructive criticism, alternative opinion), and X4 (Questions underlying assumptions). Additionally, the scheme incorporates X5, a category for the counterproductive dismissal of disagreement. The paper discusses the implications of unifying certain categories of dissent and outlines the potential for future empirical validation of the expanded model within this emerging research paradigm.